John C. Reilly Is Not Dr. Steve Brule, O.K.?

John C. Reilly is a much beloved and admired character actor who’s made something of a side hustle out of playing characters perhaps best described as, well, dinguses. From Step Brothers to Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Reilly’s best comedic characters tend to have a certain profound naïveté. And according to IMDB, Reilly does in fact play the character Dr. Steve Brule, perhaps the strongest dingus in his arsenal, and the host of the gonzo Adult Swim comedy Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule.

But when VF Hollywood recently spoke to Reilly about the new Brule vehicle Bagboy, which airs Friday night at 12:30 A.M., the actor was insistent on maintaining the gag that Brule was a real person, and the show’s creator. Throughout our conversation, Reilly refused to let up on the charade, insisting that he, Reilly, was merely the show’s executive producer. As such, he does only what most executive producers do, which, according to him, is “make money off of the actual creative talent behind the project.”

“Steve is a very talented guy, he’s an original voice and this show is as good as anything else out there,” said Reilly. “It seems like people are looking for something more honest, more original, more sincere, or more weird, and this is definitely all those things.”

As you may have by now surmised, Bagboy is not your average sitcom, nor is it meant to be. Coming out of the bizarre sketch-comedy show Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! universe, dreamed up by the sometimes-polarizing Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, Bagboy relies largely on situational humor and subtlety. If you get it, the show is knockout hilarious, but truthfully, it is not for everyone and Reilly is O.K. with that.

“If you go online, you will see people who would throw themselves in front of a train for Tim and Eric because they love them so much," he said. "And there are people who just do not get it and are violently opposed to them. I think that’s a good sign. It’s not designed to be for everybody. It’s designed to be an expression of something original.”

For Reilly, who has starred alongside Will Ferrell in some of the biggest and most universally beloved comedies such as Step Brothers and Talladega Nights, not everyone has to be in on every joke. “There should be room in the world for absurd humor,” said Reilly. “I hope there’s always room in Hollywood for people that do original work. There’s a lot of room in art for portrayals of people from all walks of life. I hope there’s always room in movies and theater and everything else for originality.”

For his part, Reilly draws a straight line between the work of Tim and Eric and once-outsider, but now-mainstream comedy acts like Monty
Python. “When Monty Python was first being shown on public television, my parents were completely mystified. They thought we were just idiots for watching that. They just did not see the humor at all, which almost made it funnier to us. It almost made us love it even more,” he said. “Only time will tell, but I think that somewhere down the line people will look at this fertile time in Tim and Eric’s career as groundbreaking and on the same kind of footing as when Monty Python came out.”

Reilly explained that the show is a sitcom based on Brule’s experiences working its titular job at Meyer’s Super Foods grocery store. The show’s elaborate backstory involves a lost television pilot that Brule once made, but that’s about as much as he’ll allow.

“Ever since Check It Out came out, all anyone wants to do is talk to Steve and know how the show is made and know what he’s like and I don’t think that’s interesting. I don’t think that helps the show,” said Reilly. “There’s no point in doing it!”

As for Reilly’s insistence that Brule exists, it might be that he just doesn’t want to have to explain the joke: “I think it’s some of the best work I’ve ever been involved with, some of the most original, some of the most sincere, some of the saddest, some of the funniest. I’m very, very proud of it and I want people to see it.”